After a terrible rookie season, how does Malik Monk get better?

Malik Monk’s rookie season was not a promising one.

The No. 11 pick in the 2017 NBA Draft, Monk never really got off the ground for the Charlotte Hornets. He played just 13.6 minutes per game, struggling to work his way into the lineup behind Jeremy Lamb and Nicolas Batum. When Batum was injured to start the season, Monk stayed on the bench as he watched fellow rookie Dwayne Bacon, selected 29 picks behind him, work his way into Charlotte’s early starting lineups. Billed as a shooter coming into the year, he hit just 36 percent from the field for the season, and he struggled to impact the game at all when he didn’t have the ball in his hands — all this while Luke Kennard and Donovan Mitchell, the two guards taken immediately after Monk, thrived in their new situations.

Monk was a player a lot of evaluators were high on in the draft community during his one college season at Kentucky. Many saw him as a top-10 prospect, and Charlotte seemed like a good fit for him. A dead-eye shooter with the Wildcats, Monk seemed like a pretty solid choice as a secondary creator for a listless offensive team. And if you’re going to pick a player who will struggle against size defensively, pairing him with Batum and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist in a Steve Clifford defensive system seems smart.

However, it didn’t work out that way, on either end. Monk couldn’t be saved on the defensive end, as he turned in a horrid minus-3.4 Defensive Box Plus-Minus season. His thin frame at 6-foot-4 made it difficult for him to deal with screens, and he showed a very troubling lack of discipline.

Offensively, that shot-making prowess that Monk showed at Kentucky never translated into real success. This isn’t too worrying by itself — a rookie shooting guard struggling to make shots early on is a pretty common occurrence — but the main reason for Monk’s sustained struggles is somewhat of a red flag.

On catch-and-shoot 3s, Monk was decent. He shot 38.9 percent per NBA player tracking data, and while Monk’s ceiling is much higher than that, it’s a pretty solid baseline for his rookie season. The trouble stems from how few of these shots he took within his overall shot distribution. 56.1 percent of Monk’s shots were classified as pull-ups, and he was bad at these — 30.3 percent from the field is unacceptable in any context, even if these are naturally lower-percentage shots.

If Monk is going to be a high-volume pull-up shooter, he absolutely has to get better at separating from defenders and getting that extra sliver of space that allows high-volume pull-up shooters like Damian Lillard to succeed. Through one season, Monk isn’t there.

Much of the problem comes from his physical limitations. He’s undersized for his position, which makes it difficult for him to extend over his taller opponents. He also doesn’t have the tightest mechanics coming off screens or out of isolation looks, and struggles to stop on a dime and get a shot up quick enough to beat the recovering defender. It’s amazing how many times Monk ran off a pick-and-roll and tried to pull-up against the big, but his gather was slow enough that by the end it looks like he’s shooting against a double-team.

This can be compensated for with a strong handle — Jamal Crawford, who Monk is commonly compared to, has remained effective as a pull-up shooter as he’s aged because of his legendary ball-handling. Monk is a decent dribbler, but he hasn’t harnessed it effectively so far. A lot of Monk’s dribble moves go nowhere, just moves for the sake of moves that can’t shake most NBA defenders.

Monk’s projection coming out of the draft was as a secondary scorer, a Crawford or Lou Williams type who may not provide much playmaking or defense, but can carry your offense while your stars sit. So far, though, Monk’s shooting profile looks problematic. He’s a high-volume off-the-dribble shooter who doesn’t have much ability to turn those looks into good ones. He is decent coming off screens, but doesn’t take enough shots off the catch and spent the year slowly getting into rhythm. And he’s never going to be strong enough to consistently finish at the rim, so a career as a Dion Waiters-type scorer might be firmly out of the picture, as well.

To fix that, he needs to work on tightening up his mechanics off the dribble — quickening his release and using his dribble more meaningfully are corrections that are possible. Monk is also likely to have an impending role change in James Borrego’s system, which would help. Taking more advantage of what should be a year two shooting bump off the catch, and utilizing him less as an initiator should help put him in a more useful context.

Monk isn’t doomed by any means. We’ve seen time and again that two-guards who are primarily shooters can survive a rough transition as they get more comfortable with the NBA line and the timing of shooting in an NBA offense. Rodney Stuckey bombed by shooting 40.1 percent from the field as a rookie with the Pistons. Kevin Martin barely played in his rookie year in Sacramento. Lamb, Monk’s teammate, took two years to get his shot right in the NBA. You can carve out the role Monk looks destined for despite a bad opening year.

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But those problems that limited Monk in his first year are significant, and it’s probably fair to recalibrate Monk’s ceiling based on what we know now. Expecting him to become a top-flight NBA shooter is probably foolish, and he definitely looks to be as one-dimensional as many thought he might be at his floor coming into the year. There’s time for Monk to find himself, but he’ll need significant changes to the ways he played in his rookie season to get there.